The all-Equity touring version of director Bart Sher's 2015 Lincoln Center revival of Richard Rodgers and Oscar Hammerstein II's "The King and I" is a magnificent, genuinely revelatory production that you do not want to miss.

I start with such a naked and rhetorically unadorned assertion because few titles are as overexposed in Chicago as this one and, as you likely know, tours vary a lot these days in quality. There was a heavily marketed, major staging of this 1951 masterpiece at the Lyric Opera just over a year ago, to name just one. That production had a larger orchestra and more gilt, if you like gilt. But in every other respect, this one at the Oriental Theatre is far, far superior.

And for those Midwest-based Rodgers and Hammerstein devotees and experts who did not have the pleasure at the Lincoln Center, there really is enough that going on here that you should show up and imbibe.

All tours of major New York stagings — especially the work that comes from the thrust stage of the Lincoln Center — involve compromises. Some scenic elements from Michael Yeargan's design are reduced in size here, for example. The cast looks slightly smaller. But Sher did this tour — which stars Jose Llana, a replacement in the role of the King of Siam on Broadway, and the British actress Laura Michelle Kelly — himself. You can tell.

Why all my enthusiasm? Encapsulated: Sher takes a show often accused, with foundation, of fetishizing the East and normalizing colonialism and turns it into a emotionally intense meditation on the desirability of, and the sacrifices implicit in, the embrace of modernity.

And on the subversive attributes of exceptional 19th-century women who found a way to make change. Here, that includes the women of Siam.

Sher does this not by imposing some external concept on the show but by teasing what was always there in the work of two Broadway geniuses who were far ahead of their time when it came to preaching tolerance and finding ways for the farmers and the cowmen, or the King of Siam and a British schoolteacher, to each give a little to come together.

Here are some representative specifics for those who know the show well.

You see the tensions faced by Anna right from "I Whistle a Happy Tune," which is not the usual jocular opener but a defense against palpable personal terror. The stakes are high on the dock, and they stay there as we move inside the palace.

During the famous ballet known as "The Small House of Uncle Thomas" (typically a pastiche), you see within Christopher Gattelli's choreography the unfolding fear of those charged with its increasingly subversive performance.

The King's children, whose entrance in Rodgers' magnificently scored "March of the Royal Siamese Children" is justly famed, are not cute. They are real. They're bookish. They are the optimistic future: The Crown Prince comes with his own rising, kinder, gentler Kralahome. Yet you also see the mothers loving and worrying about the status of their own children in the polyamorous royal tradition.

Llana's King is, from the start, demonstrably less sure of himself than Kelly's Anna. In that greater regal vulnerability lies one of the keys to Sher's unpacking of this work: in his hands, "The King and I" is about cultural wrestling over language, gender, power, how we teach our young and how we deal with the news, fake and otherwise. The production makes clear the importance of change, and yet also our moral obligation to ensure that those caught in its crosshairs are soothed and understood. These are the very issues that are compelling to us today; R and H have much to teach us all still about tolerance.

So. All of the principals in the show are excellent, from Kelly and Llana to Joan Almedilla's formidable Lady Thiang and Manna Nichols' complex Tuptim, a character here quietly but determinedly linked to sex trafficking in a way I never have seen.

You do not see Llana's gleaming torso in the archaic Yul Brynner tradition — rather, you see the complexity of a potentially great modern leader. Kelly shows you a woman born too soon, but also someone who has to learn about herself.

But that does not mean eroticism is not present. On the contrary, Sher shows you the precise moment when it enters the consciousness of this show's many fevered lovers, young and old.